FOUR STARS
In the France of 1933, the citizens attend astonished to the details of a lurid crime conducted by the Papin sisters. Two domestic workers, Christine and Léa, they have cruelly murdered their employer, Léonie Lancelin and Geneviève, their youngest daughter. According to chronicles of the time, it all began when Madame returned early to her home and found it in darkness, perhaps because of a badly plugged-in iron that would have caused the blackout.
The truth is that it was as if twilight had entered their halls and darkened everything around them. furious,
it would have started an argument that ended in a ferocious carnage.
The media of the time, quick to find causes for the folly, began to speculate and suggest different interpretations. Some referred to the influence of childhood violence on adults and personality disorders. It was even suggested that the massacre might have been caused by the class struggle. The truth is that the case was so impressive that Jacques Lacan, renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, published a detailed study on the drive
murderer.
Years later, Jean Geneta great innovator of the French theater, writes from prison, “The Maids”, his masterpiece. Although he never admitted that the story had served as a reference, there are echoes in it that suggest so. In pieces
later, as “Severe vigilance” either “The balcony”will continue to reflect a world inhabited by the marginal characters that populated his youth.
Here the plot is located in the house where Solange Lermercier (Pablo Finamore) and her sister Clara (Claudio Pazos) work, both subjected to the daily demands of a lady (Dolores Ocampo) whom they fear, but
on which they depend to somehow exist. In a suffocating climate, which will increase in crescendo, they take advantage of the mistress’s absence to humiliate each other in a kind of disturbing secular ceremony in which they exchange roles of domination, while they fantasize about freeing themselves from the woman, murdering her.
In this new staging of the Buenos Aires billboard, perhaps as a reflection of today’s society and given the number of violent acts, what the text suggests in a larval way is exacerbated. The direction of Facundo Ramírez updates and recharges, with a good eye, the inks in the cruelty of the relationship that unites them.
There is an admirable dedication from the talented Finamore and Pazos, he is not far behind. Both are like two animals that bleed to death on stage and constitute the great attraction of this version that can be enjoyed at the unusual time of the
Sundays after noon.
